


It's all messy

by Drachenfee



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Actually I have about 3-4 chapters of it written but there is no ending so far, EWE, First chapter is golden trio only, Hermione and Harry are casual, Post-War, Reconciliations, Side-ships incoming, Slytherins are not generally evil just dumb kids, Some none-descriptive sex, WIP you have been warned, a sort of fix it for the mind, free form?, funny and fluffy with a side of introspection, rating might be teen and up but i'm being careful, references to canon-typical violence?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-20 16:21:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14897922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drachenfee/pseuds/Drachenfee
Summary: It’s all messy: The hair. The bed. The words. The heart. Life. – William LealIt's the summer after the battle of Hogwarts. Hermione graduates after a full "eighth" year at Hogwarts. Harry is training to become an Auror and fills No. 12 Grimmauld Place with friends and family and the occasional childhood nemesis. They come and find refuge with him for a while: between relationships, between jobs, between lives. Hermione is an odd constant in his life: unchangeably, irremovably part of his soul but not always with him. She slips in and out of his house and his bed and his relationships with his companions. It's not perfect. It's sometimes messy. It's just life.





	1. Life can only be understood backwards...

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize for the summary. I didn't have one planned. And I didn't have a title for the fic either. And I have only the vaguest outline of where I want this to go. I have 3-4 fully written chapters, but no actual 'end point'. I only get to write for it in rare moments (it started sometime last year, to put it in perspective). It meanders a lot and there is going to be no suspense or real plot in this. It's really just me exploring a bunch of different relationships within the HP Universe. I've agonized over actually publishing it here vs. letting it rot on my hard drive forever. Anyway.. here it is. 
> 
> As always: I am a second language english speaker, so please feel free to point out grammatical errors and/or spelling mistakes, and I'll try to correct them. I love feedback and comments and kudos, but sometimes I get in my social anxiety phase and stop answering. If it happens, please know that I did read the comment and see the kudos and appreciate it very much, even if I end up playing dead for a while.

***

After the war Hermione returns to school. It’s what good girls do. Isn’t it? Go to school, get your A-Levels (or NEWTs as the case may be). She feels nothing. No pride, no ambition. Her diploma with its nine Os might as well be a small pile of ashes. On the day of her graduation she smiles and preens because it’s what they all expect of her. And if there’s one thing she can’t bring herself to do, it’s to disappoint her professors and her friends.

Harry is there, and so is Ron. She and Ron didn’t work out. Surprisingly, it’s fine. They’re better friends than they’ve ever been before, now that Hermione is no longer trying to make him study and be more intellectual. She laughs at his antics and tries to listen when he talks about quidditch, something she never did during their short attempt at dating. Ron tries to understand the magical theory behind her ideas and hasn’t called her a know-it-all in months.

Harry though... Harry is different. He’s an auror in training, and he wears his training robes with aplomb. They’re a part of him. He’s grown out his hair and wears it in a man bun at the back of his head. He’s grown a beard. His scars are prominently visible; on his forehead and temple, on the back of his hand, and with his dress shirt partway-undone, also on his chest. He reminds her a little of Sirius in his leather jacket. And a little of Remus, all those scars on display... and for the first time, he reminds her of his dad as she saw him in Headmaster Snape’s pensieved memories.

Because Harry struts. It’s not quite as arrogant as when his dad was doing it as a stupid, entitled teenager. But there is a self-confidence about the way he moves that he never had before. And Hermione is so proud of him, she almost bursts into tears. This is not the boy who thought he _really_ was a freak. This is the _man_ who lived twice.

Molly doesn’t like it. She gives Harry the stink eye and motions for him to button up his dress shirt, but he blithely ignores her. When Hermione sees him exchange a smirk with Bill, still wearing his dragon fang earring even while guiding a heavily pregnant Fleur to her seat, she realizes why. Harry knows Molly loves him. He doesn’t have to marry her youngest, doesn’t have to pick a career she likes, doesn’t have to dress in the bland, responsible way she would prefer. Molly Weasley has adopted him into her family, and her disapproval of his current look won’t change anything about her motherly love.

Hermione envies him that certainty. She hasn’t _really_ felt like a part of the Weasley family since Molly cut her when she believed all those lies and rumors in her fourth year. Oh, the boys are like her cousins who she actually gets to see every once in a while, and Arthur is still a kind uncle. But she no longer trusts Molly the way she used to, and she feels the strain of pretending when she goes to the Burrow for Holidays and Birthday celebrations.

She takes a stroll with Ron around the lake, when everything gets to be a little too much during the celebration. They talk about their plans for the immediate future. Ron is at the auror academy with Harry. They have two more years of training, before they will join the ministry ranks as junior aurors. Ron complains about all the written exams and essays, just like he used to about his homework at school. He talks about the flying drills and the combat simulations, too. But there is something missing. He’s half-way through describing an exercise – something to do with ‘exact apparition points’ and ‘stunner-to-target-timing’ – when it finally clicks for Hermione. The enthusiasm she would have expected for a task this exciting isn’t there.

“You’re doing it for Harry,” she says bluntly.

Ron stares at her guiltily, like she just caught him kicking a house-elf.

“You’re not doing this because you want to,” she repeats, “You’re doing it for Harry.”

Ron sighs, and scratches the back of his neck, staring out at the lake for a long moment. Then he nods, and when he looks back at her, she can see that he is ashamed of himself.

“I’m tired of fighting, Hermione. The thing I like most about my days... it’s dropping by the shop after training and helping George shelve things. Perhaps... Maybe I’m just not... I don’t know,” he trails off, looking at the ground.

Hermione’s heart breaks a little for him, even as she is overcome with pride. Ron, who has always wanted to be special and the best, without ever feeling like he could actually achieve either, is tired of all the excitement. He longs for contentment, and he knows exactly where he’ll find it. She steps up to him and hugs him as she fiercely whispers into his ear, “You’re not a coward, Ron, you could never be.”

The look of relief on Ron’s face when she pulls back makes her want to travel back in time and hit her younger self for belittling him all the time. Because he _is_ a fighter, and he _is_ courageous. But Ron is first and foremost Molly and Arthur’s son. And suddenly Hermione understands something about her friend that used to drive her up the wall: He’s _not_ lazy. Not really. He lacks ambition. But why should he need it. If there is one thing the Weasley parents can teach anybody willing to learn, it is that you don’t need advancement and careers and a lot of money to be happy. You just need yourself, and your family, and your friends, and your happy, ordinary life. Ron wants that ordinary happiness. And Hermione can’t blame him.

“This is what we fought for, Ron,” she murmurs. “We fought so we wouldn’t _have to_ fight any more.” She pauses and looks back at the celebration in front of the castle, the mingling students and parents. Not a family that isn’t missing at least one person that should be here... because they’re dead, or in jail, or in St. Mungo’s, or missing. Molly is hugging Susan Bones, whom she barely knows, but poor Susan has no one. So Molly is there for her.

“I think... I think the bravest thing, would be not to fight now. To allow yourself to be normal again,” Hermione admits. She fingers the scar on her arm, the word carved there still sharply raised against the rest of her skin. “To allow yourself to...” she almost says ‘settle’, but she doesn’t want to hurt Ron, now that she realizes that her idea of success and happiness aren’t necessarily the same as his. And that this fact does not mean that he is wrong. So instead she says: “To allow yourself to calm down and enjoy your life at your own pace.”

Ron smiles at her, clearly surprised by her kindness. And it hurts to know that he expected her to tear into him, that her soothing words are not what he thought was coming. What kind of friend does that make her?

As they begin the walk back to the other end of the lake where the party is still in full swing, Ron asks her about her own plans. “You’ll want to start working on some mastery or other? Or go to university, right?”

She nods, then frowns and shakes her head instead. “Eventually,” she says when he raises his eyebrows in question. “But first I promised Luna that I would go and search for the... something-fanged something-else with her in Paraguay.”

She laughs when Ron’s eyes look like they’re about to fall out of his head at this revelation.

“You’re doing WHAT?”

“You heard me,” she chuckles. Then she has to grab Ron by his trainee robes to stop him from tearing after Ginny and Blaise Zabini, who are heading into the eaves of the forest for some snogging. As Ron begins ranting somewhat good-naturedly about ‘younger sisters’ and ‘evil snakes’, Hermione thinks that at least some things never change.

***

Later that evening, at the tail-end of the party, Hermione overhears Molly admonish Harry for his choice of hairdo and attire.

“Too much like Sirius, I liked the man, mind, but still, Harry... much too young to go off walking around like ... not right and proper ... be an example to all the other young people around... responsibilities...”

Hermione catches Harry’s eyes and rolls her own a little while smiling. He smirks back at her and motions with his head towards the castle doors where people are milling about, saying their goodbyes before flooing home. She joins him there a few moments later. They don’t talk to each other, but say casual goodbyes to teachers and friends as they walk up the steps and into the cool entrance hall of the old castle. For a moment Harry looks around wistfully, perhaps wondering what his last year at school might have been like, or reliving fond memories. Then they reach the floo and Harry pulls her close before dropping the green powder on the flames, transporting them both to Grimmauld Place.

That night, Hermione climbs into Harry’s bed and rides him until her thighs burn and quiver with exhaustion. In the morning, she packs a few things she might need, and hugs Harry goodbye as though nothing happened, then she meets Luna at the international portkey office in the ministry.

Harry says nothing. They know each other better than most friends, or siblings, or even lovers. She promises to be careful and to write to him. He doesn’t ask for more.

***


	2. ... but must be lived forwards (Soren Kirkegaard)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry's POV for this chapter and the next. Chapters are going to be quite short, I'm afraid. I've split what I have gotten so far into this plus one more chapter, so I have three finished chapters. And a couple of ideas for more, but I don't know when I'll get to sit down and write them all out.  
> This chapter contains Harry being Harry, Luna being Luna and a couple of new house guests.

***

While Hermione is gone, Harry begins adopting strays. It starts one day while he’s walking through the ministry corridor and overhears Theo Nott complain to a haughty-looking flunky at a desk about how the ministry won’t let him access any of his funds – not even his inheritance from his mother – and won’t let him into his manor either.

He doesn’t really think about the offer, acts like the Gryffindor he is. Nott looks at him like he’s grown a second head.

Harry shrugs. “It’s a big house, there’s me, and a crazy old house-elf. Sometimes Ron comes over. Ginny stays sometimes as well.” He shrugs again.

Nott’s eyes narrow suspiciously, “Why?” There is a world of uncertainty in that one word. ‘Why would you help me?’ it asks... and it means all of the questions that entails. _Why? Why me? Why you? What is it you want from me? What do you expect from me in exchange?_

Harry blinks. To him it’s obvious. “Because we were all of us just dumb kids. They set us on each other, and now everybody expects us to act as though nothing happened. Except... that’s not true, because they want me to act as though you weren’t just as much a victim of the war as I was. As though kids on your side didn’t suffer as much as on my side. You never did anything to hurt me, or Hermione, or anybody I know of.”

Nott blinks, then he nods slowly.

He moves into Grimmauld Place at the end of the week. He doesn’t bring any luggage, at least not that Harry can see. Later he finds out that Theo is pretty good with charms. And transfiguration. And ancient runes. He hopes Theo will stay till Hermione is back, because he has a feeling those two will get along like an ivory tower on fire. Much later he finds out that Theo really didn’t bring more than a change of clothes at first, not willing to risk his few possessions if this really was a trap he stepped into.

Several days later, Theo tells Harry that he had been staying with Zabini. That it might have been okay, if Ginny Weasley hadn’t spent so much time there. Harry stares at him, without saying a word and Nott seems to think that makes him sound like he has a problem with blood-traitors, so he adds, “Neither of them is any good at casting silencing charms.” From the sheepish look on his face, it’s clear that he only realizes after he says it, that he’s talking about Harry’s ex-girlfriend.

But Harry just snickers. “Yeah, Ginny really has a lot of problems remembering her silencing charms... unless she’s sneaking out of the house of course.” Then he mutters something about her ‘exhibitionist streak’ under his breath with an sheepish eye roll.

Nott relaxes.

***

Neville moves in next. His grandmother kicked him out when he made it clear that he has no intention whatsoever of becoming an auror. He’s joined the London University of Magic, going for a mastery in herbology. He’s also registered for some muggle botanical classes. He’s grown into a quiet young man. Self-confident, with none of the boisterousness so typical of Gryffindors.

When he strolls through Diagon Alley with Harry and Theo during the long autumn evenings on the way to the Leaky for a post-work/school/what-is-it-you-do-all-day-again-Theo beer, he draws a lot of star-struck stares and sighs from the witches they pass. He doesn’t notice. He’s too busy rambling about a rare magical bromeliad he found in the back of the muggle green-houses at uni.

***

Harry runs into Luna at Manic Monica’s Magical Menagerie on the day he decides to – finally – get himself a new owl. It’s late October and the days are growing short, and oddly it feels like it’s time to lay the last of the old ghosts to rest. He’ll never forget poor Hedwig – his first pet, the first birthday gift he ever got from the first friend he ever made – but she’s gone, poor bird. He’s staring back and forth between a couple of Athena owls and an enormous European eagle owl, when he becomes aware of someone quietly standing next to him. He’s just about to turn his head when he hears her voice, which sounds just like it always used to: gentle, quiet, far-away, and somehow both achingly real and otherworldly at the same time.

“I don’t think either of those is quite right,” Luna says with the absolute certainty that Harry admires so much about her.

“I think you’re probably quite right about that,” he says, as he steps towards her and hugs her tightly. When he pulls back, Luna’s smile is radiant. “Hermione didn’t mention that you two were coming back.” He’s torn inside. He wants to stay and talk to his friend, but he really wants to go see Hermione, wherever she is right now. Luna is special and will always be special to him. But Hermione is ... it’s just that it’s him and Hermione. Always him and Hermione... in a tent... at Grimmauld Place... in his heart.

Luna shakes her head, “Didn’t she tell you? I came back, because I need to get the Quibbler up and running again, now that I’m out of school. I know Father would want it. But Hermione decided to stay in South America. She wants to go see the magical quarter near Machu Picchu before she comes home. And maybe go see the channeling at the magical leyline at Ushuaia.”

Harry frowns a little. “No, she didn’t mention anything about that.” He pauses, staring at the owls in their cages for a long moment, thinking about Hermione, and South America, and old magic imbued in stones. He’s sure Hermione mentioned something about that in her last letter. “Which owl do _you_ think I should pick?” He asks, and Luna smiles.

***

When Luna brings Draco Sodding Malfoy to Grimmauld Place, Harry almost has an aneurism. It pisses him off for two reasons:

One: Theo smirks at him with that ‘I know you hate this, but you’re way too proud to turn back on your noble words, you Gryffindor Git’ look all over his face... and two: Mercury fucking adores Malfoy.

“Traitor,” he mutters at the short-eared owl once Luna drags Malfoy off to her room, and Mercury finally flies over to where Harry is sitting to nibble on his ear.

Neville snorts.

“Oh, come on, you dislike him just as much as I do!” Harry grouses at him. 

“You’re wrong,” Neville tells him without heat, while he gently pats a rare species of succulent on the window sill. The plant promptly emits a high pitched sound that makes Harry think of a gong... on helium. “I saw him at school during our last year. _Both_ last years. It’s funny really. There was a war going on, if there ever was a time to enjoy watching your bully get what he had coming, it was then.”

“But you didn’t,” Harry says.

“No, I didn’t.”

Harry looks at Theo, who shrugs.

“I’ve always been friends with Draco,” he says calmly. “He’s a poncy prat much of the time, but... his pain is just as real as mine, and yours. Perhaps there’s more pain. He didn’t get a chance to _redeem_ himself. He made no one proud. And, unlike the three of us, he still has parents to disappoint, and he is sure that that’s all they’ll ever be... disappointed.”

“It was weird watching him walk the halls when we were all studying for NEWTS afterwards, you know,” Neville says. “He used to be so... in your face. Suddenly, it was as though all he wanted to be was normal. To be just Draco. Just another dumb kid trying to get good test results while keeping his head down.”  

Harry stares into Mercury’s bright orange eyes as he thinks about that. There is a part of him that wonders if maybe, Malfoy knows what it’s like. What it means to be ‘the chosen one’. What it means to know that if you mess up everyone you love will die. But most of him just dislikes the hell out of the rich bully who was too cowardly to say no.

“Fuck Malfoy,” he mutters under his breath.

It’s Neville who calmly says: “I believe that is exactly what Luna is doing right now, but you could probably get in line.”

Harry drops his head against the desk and groans. The mild stinging hex he aims at Neville misses him completely, but shatters a rather ugly vase someone sent Harry for his last birthday. Theo snickers behind his Advanced Alchemy Journal.

***


	3. Men build too many walls, and not enough bridges (Joseph Fort Newton)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hermione returns.

On Christmas morning, Harry stumbles into the kitchen half-awake and more than half-drunk. On his way down the stairs during his third almost-fall, he made up his mind to never drink another drop of Firewhiskey. _Sobriety here I am_. What he sees in the kitchen makes him want to rethink that particular idea.

Hermione is sitting cross-legged on the large wooden table. Which is fine. Harry likes Hermione, and she can sit anywhere she likes, even barefoot on the table if that’s her choice. He’s been missing her like a limb since she left. She’s drinking something from a sort of metal straw-looking thing in a small metal cup. A little odd perhaps, but still fine. She’s smirking at Malfoy, who is sitting on a chair across from her – staring at her with a mixture of awe and dread like she is some sort of exotic creature he wants to pet, except he doesn’t want to risk being maimed in the process. Again.

“You did not,” Malfoy says, with the absolute certainty of someone who doesn’t know Hermione very well.

There is an odd mixture of fierce glee and righteous anger on her face, when she leans forward and says very quietly: “Oh, yes, Malfoy, I did.”

There is a long pause. Malfoy’s eyes are narrowed slightly, like he’s looking for a tell that will give away the game and will mark Hermione a liar. But she is perfectly calm and collected, and Harry knows the look he just saw quite well. It’s the look Hermione gets when people ask her if she really sent Umbridge to the centaurs on purpose. Right before she sighs and adds that she ‘ _did_ hope Grawp would squash her like the ugly toad she is, of course, but the centaurs were a nice alternative.’

“You did what?” Harry asks, breaking the tension that is strung between Slytherin and Gryffindor like a cord.

“Nothing.”

Harry blinks. They both say it at the same time, using the exact same tone of voice. A year ago, he would have insisted on having answers. A month ago, he might have tried to trick either of them into telling him. But after a few weeks with Draco Malfoy moving in and out of his house (practically living there whenever he needs to avoid his parents, really), Harry knows him just well enough to decide – even while half-drunk – that if Hermione and Malfoy _agree_ about not telling him something, he really, _really_ doesn’t want to know.

So he mutters _Okay, then_ under his breath, then stumbles toward the cupboard where Neville put all the medical supplies, praying he’ll find a sober-up potion in there. Maybe, he’ll discover that this was just a weird drunken hallucination.

***

It’s not a hallucination, of course.

Malfoy is... deliberate... in the way he treats Hermione. Not _careful_ , because he really is a poncy, arrogant, spoilt prat and he doesn’t change that just because Hermione is around for a couple of weeks. But... there is a respectfulness mixed in with his prattishness that reminds Harry of their first couple of years at Hogwarts: back when not pissing off professors was a thing they all did, because the idea of getting detention and having a letter send to the parents was the scariest thing in the world. Before Fake-Moody, back when the carriages pulled themselves, when even Harry would not have dreamed of saying something like ‘You don’t have to call me _Sir_ , Professor’ to anyone.

Malfoy isn’t scared, Harry decides, as much as that idea appeals to him. But he has a healthy respect for Hermione. A healthy _Slytherin_ respect that has nothing to do with _fantastic_ NEWT scores, or that time _Hermione_ punched _Malfoy_ in the _face_ and it was totally freaking awesome, or knowing that come what may you can _always trust her to help you_. It’s the respect of someone who realizes that he is dealing with a powerful, intelligent, inventive adversary... an adversary who won’t hesitate to do what needs to be done.

It reminds him a little of the way Malfoy used to act around Professor Snape. But thinking of Professor Snape still hurts Harry in ways he can’t quite define or put a name to. So Harry tries hard not to notice the very careful prodding during dinner conversations, the way questions go unasked, the fine line of tension between Malfoy and Hermione that he sometimes wants to thrum his fingers over. He imagines that it would feel like touching a guitar string. That there would be some sort of sound if that tension was... thrummed. For lack of a better word.

Neville is the one who finally puts it into words. And right in front of Malfoy and Hermione, too. “Look, I know Hermione spends more time in Harry’s room than she does in her own, but...” he pauses as everybody stares at him.

Harry fights the urge to squeeze his eyes shut so he won’t have to witness the bloodbath.

“Yes, Neville?” Hermione askes in a voice exuding perfect calm. Malfoy just raises an eyebrow.

“Could you and Malfoy just... fuck or something,” Neville adds, proving once and for all that the sorting hat really did stick him in the right house all those years ago… and that he has balls the size of Jupiter. “The tension is getting really annoying.”

There is a different sort of tension for a moment, then Theo mutters from behind a book, “Or you could hex each other. If you do what Longbottom says, I’ll make one of you pay for seeing a professional.”

“A professional?” Hermione asks excitedly, “What like a wizard psychotherapist or something?”

“What’s a psychotherapist?” Malfoy asks.

“Like someone who knows how to obliviate me without scrambling my brains,” Theo dead-pans at the same moment.

“A psychotherapist is a specially trained muggle who helps with behavioral and emotional problems,” Hermione explains, ignoring Theo’s comment.

“What like a parent?” Malfoy asks. Theo and Neville both look confused.

“No,” Harry says, “Like a healer for the mind instead of for the body.”

Hermione blinks at him. “That is actually a really good description. Well done, Harry.”

Harry is about to complain about being talked to like a puppy who performed a trick, when Theo asks, “How do you become a therapist?”

There is a long, _long_ discussion about muggle schools, universities, A-Levels and the like. It begins in the living room, travels to the kitchen for dinner and returns to the living room, and ends in the hallway on the second floor... in a screaming match about the superiority of the muggle/wizarding/take-your-pick approach to education.

Then... then Malfoy kisses Hermione. For about half a minute.

When he pulls back, Hermione grins at him. “Okay, now that that’s settled, I’d just like to say that naturally the muggle educational system is decades ahead of the wizarding system both in its didactic methods and in its choice of subjects.” Then she turns on her heel, grabs a stunned Harry by the shirt and drags him to his room, where they fuck until neither of them can walk straight.

***

It takes three more weeks before Malfoy and Hermione reach some sort of understanding. Harry emphatically doesn’t want to know how they got to this point. One morning he is off to auror training and when he gets back in the evening the tension is gone and Malfoy and Hermione are… comfortable with each other. They’re not friends exactly. But they’re very clearly not enemies either.

By the time February rolls around, Hermione is off again, this time to wizarding Europe. She writes to Harry about Roman sacrificial sites and the ghosts of French nobles who wander the countryside if you know where to look. She sends him pressed flowers from a tiny valley in the Pyrenees that Harry ends up giving to Neville.

In the three months that Hermione travels through Europe, Luna moves out (of Grimmauld Place) and on (from her wildly-placid non-relationship with Draco). Theo starts reading muggle text books. He also starts venturing out into muggle London on almost a daily basis. Harry only has to go with him the first six or seven times before he seems to have gotten the hang of mixing in with muggles. He’s not flawless by a long shot, but when people ask him, he just tells them he was raised Amish (a trick Hermione apparently suggested and Harry didn’t even know they were exchanging letters) and they hmmm and ahhh and play tourist guide for him.

There is a night in March when Theo is out with ‘Michael from the coffee shop I told you about… no not that one, that’s John and he was an accountant in training’. And Neville is on a cross country trip to some very special botanical garden exhibit or something. And it’s just Harry and Malfoy.

It’s the night Malfoy becomes Draco.

Harry knew that Malfoy had nightmares of course. He has heard Malfoy’s anguished pleas through the doors of Grimmauld Place, after his silencing charms have worn off... and he suspects that Malfoy has heard Harry’s own cries, too.

He doesn’t expect to find Malfoy crying with his head in his hands at the kitchen table at 2 AM. That’s Harry’s first mistake.

His second mistake is opening the bottle of cheap firewhiskey Theo stashed in one of the cupboards.

There is soul searching that night. Frank conversation that ends up being borderline communicative (as in both sides actually _listen_ and _concede_ certain points, and while sneering and sulking and insulting the other are, of course, a part of the process – they don’t take it over).

Turns out, Draco knows exactly what it feels like to be ‘chosen’.

“People think it means something good.”

“People think it means you have a destiny, that you’re special.”

“Being chosen means only one thing.”

It means you don’t get to make a choice. Some things don’t need to be said. At least not in this weird interpersonal void between Harry and Draco.

Because Harry _can’t_ call him Malfoy after that. Draco only calls him Potter once before he switches to Harry. Ron raises his eyebrows so high they vanish in his hair when Harry tells him about it. He spends almost no time with ‘the snakes’, as he calls them, between looking after George and helping at the shop and half-hearted attempts at not failing auror training. When Harry finds out six months later that Ron is dating Daphne Greengrass, he laughs until he has tears in his eyes.  

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anybody wanna guess what it was Hermione did that Draco finds so hard to believe? I haven't actually written a "Harry finding out" moment. I don't plan to either, but I have a headcanon about it I'll be happy to share at the beginning of the next chapter if anybody is interested. 
> 
> The next chapter may be a while in coming, because this is as far as I've gotten and inspiration is a "far and few between" sort of thing for me. I hope you enjoyed it anyway :)


End file.
